UI/UX
UX Research
Product Design
Branding
Interaction Design
Explore Ladakh is a travel and tourism website for a Ladakh-based agency specialising in curated tours, treks, and experiences across the region — redesigned to better reflect the raw beauty and spirit of the destination.
01 Explore Ladakh
This is a self-initiated redesign project exploring how a travel website can move beyond listing services and actually communicate the character of a place. The brief I set myself was straightforward: take a destination with extraordinary visual appeal and build a digital experience that does it justice. Explore Ladakh is a travel and tourism agency offering curated tours, treks, and experiences across the Ladakh region, and it served as the perfect canvas for that question.
about
Existing Website / What Wasn't Working
Before jumping into redesign, I spent time genuinely understanding the existing site — not to find fault, but to understand what it was trying to do and where the experience was falling short for users.
The site had clearly been built to communicate a lot of information: packages, destinations, contact details, travel guides. The intent was thorough. But over time, the accumulation of content without a consistent visual system had made it harder for users to find what they were looking for — or to feel the pull of the destination itself.
A few patterns stood out:
Visual identity
The site leaned on a red-and-white template aesthetic that, while functional, didn't carry a sense of place. Ladakh has an extraordinarily distinct character — high altitude, raw landscapes, deep cultural history. The visual design hadn't yet found a way to reflect that, which meant the site wasn't using one of its strongest assets: the destination itself.
Photography
Images were present throughout the site but were often displayed small and tightly cropped. Given that most travellers make emotionally-driven decisions — they need to feel a place before they book it — there was a significant opportunity to let the photography do more of the selling.
Navigation
The header carried two layers of navigation simultaneously: a primary nav and a secondary utility bar for contact details and CTAs. For a first-time visitor trying to orient themselves, this created a lot of competing information before they'd engaged with any content.
Typography and hierarchy
Without a clear typographic system, it was difficult to distinguish between primary information, secondary context, and supporting detail. Body text was set small in places, which added friction for users reading on desktop.
Page density
Several pages packed a lot of content into tight layouts with limited breathing room. For someone arriving at the site for the first time — perhaps considering a significant trip — the density made it harder to slow down, explore, and feel confident about what they were looking at.
Information architecture
Key content like packages, destinations, and contact options was present but distributed across the site without a strong hierarchy guiding users toward a natural next step. There was no clear throughline from browsing to enquiring.
The core opportunity — Ladakh sells itself to anyone who has seen a photograph of it. The redesign's central goal was to build a site that got out of its own way — one that put the destination front and centre and made the path from curiosity to enquiry as frictionless as possible.
Since this was a self-initiated project without access to real user data, I spent time thinking carefully about who genuinely travels to Ladakh — and what they'd need from a website to feel confident enough to enquire.
Three distinct traveller types emerged from that thinking. A solo photographer who researches heavily before committing. A culturally curious traveller who reads deeply and moves at her own pace. A family planner who needs logistics clarity and a human touchpoint before he books.
Each one directly shaped specific design decisions — from the scale of photography to the structure of the enquiry form. Every choice in the redesign can be traced back to one of these three people.
User Personas
Design Direction
Before touching any individual page, I wanted to establish a clear point of view for the redesign as a whole. Piecemeal fixes, tidying up the nav here, improving typography there, wouldn't address the underlying problem. The site needed a consistent visual language and a clear sense of what it was trying to make users feel. The central idea was simple:
Ladakh is the product. The website's job is to get out of its way.
That meant committing to a design language that was editorial and restrained, one that gave photography room to breathe, kept the interface quiet enough that the landscapes could do the heavy lifting, and replaced the site's existing busyness with deliberate calm. The red and white template aesthetic was set aside in favour of something that felt more like a travel publication than a booking portal.
Typographically, the wordmark was scaled up to become a design element in its own right, present and confident across every page. A tight, consistent type hierarchy was established so users always knew what to read first. Whitespace was treated as an active design decision. The tone across the site shifted too. Copy was written to sell a feeling before selling a package, short, poetic, and sure of itself. Every page was asking the same quiet question: does this feel like Ladakh?
With that direction locked in, the page-level decisions followed naturally.
Landing page
The original homepage had two headers stacked on top of each other, meaning users were already past a wall of navigation before seeing a single image. The first decision was to consolidate everything into one clean nav bar, freeing up the screen for what actually mattered.
The fragmented image strip that followed was replaced with a single full-bleed cinematic photograph. Ladakh's landscapes are extraordinary, and the hero's only job was to show that immediately. The wordmark was scaled up to editorial proportions and treated as a visual anchor rather than just a logo. The tagline was kept short and poetic, written to establish a feeling before introducing any packages or services. The overall intent was to shift the page from a service listing to an invitation.
Destinations
The original destinations page presented a flat list of place names with small thumbnail images. It gave users very little sense of geography, context, or why any particular destination was worth choosing.
The redesign anchors the page around an interactive map of Ladakh, giving users a spatial sense of the region before they engage with any individual location. Practical travel information, including best time to visit, how to reach, and local events, was organised into an accordion panel on the left, keeping it accessible without crowding the layout. Selecting a location on the map reveals a large contextual image alongside an editorial description. The goal was for navigation to feel like genuine discovery.
Packages
The original packages page presented every tour as an identical list item with little visual differentiation, making it hard for any particular trip to stand out.
Each package was redesigned as an editorial card leading with a large image, so the destination registers before the details arrive. Structured metadata, including duration, destination, group size, and difficulty, sits beneath each card in a consistent icon-led format. Users can assess the key information at a glance without reading through paragraph descriptions.
Gallery
The original gallery organised images into small categorised thumbnails, which felt more like a filing system than a visual experience. For a destination as photogenic as Ladakh, this was a significant opportunity left on the table.
The redesign uses a masonry grid at varying scales, letting images breathe and interact with each other across the layout. A dark background was a deliberate choice, one that makes the colours and textures of the landscapes genuinely pop. A short poetic intro line at the top sets the tone before the images take over completely.
Contact
Renaming the page "Talk to Us" was a small change with deliberate intent. It shifts the register of the interaction from administrative to conversational, which felt more in keeping with the kind of trip someone is considering when they reach out.
A large landscape image on the left gives the page warmth and context, making it feel like an invitation rather than a formality. The form itself was expanded to capture arrival date, number of days, group size, and specific requirements, turning the first point of contact into a lightweight trip-planning conversation. A directional arrow replaces a generic submit button, keeping the interaction minimal and on-brand.
Footer
The footer was designed as a final brand moment for each page rather than a purely functional utility section. The wordmark was scaled up to own the space visually, making it the anchor of the entire footer layout.
Two versions were designed, one light and one dark, so the footer could adapt to whichever page it closes without feeling like a jarring visual switch at the bottom. Contact details and site links were laid out cleanly alongside the wordmark, keeping everything accessible without competing with it. The intent was for the footer to feel like a confident sign-off that belongs to the page it sits on.
Working on this project clarified something that now sits at the centre of how I approach design.
A product can be fully functional and still fall short if it doesn't connect with the person using it.
The gap between a site that works and a site that resonates is almost always a design decision.
Explore Ladakh was a good brief to learn that on.
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